Posts by Julian Bond

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Yes, but,

I'm not going to disagree with the main thrust of the argument. But I do think you're overstating it and using it to have a go at other social attitudes.

1) A big part of that increase in agricultural productivity from one person feeding two people to feeding 100 people is Promethean energy use rather than Smithsian productivity via specialisation. It can't be done without the increase in energy usage facilitated by cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. Yes, going against that specialisation is a bad idea, but the system is still broken and solutions still have to be found to create a sustainable version of late 20th century agriculture.

2) Just because there's a section of the Green, eco-aware movement that is into the stupidity of knitting yogurt into yurts doesn't mean that the Green, eco-aware movement can be dismissed totally as universally stupid. Repeating that too much begins to look like techno-utopian denialism and an attempt to smear attempts to recognise a real problem and look for real solutions to it.

Which is to say we need a Green movement that embraces technology, specialism and capitalism. But it still needs to be Green.

"had the Charlie Hebdo murderers under surveillance until six months before". Can you name any terrorist outrage in recent years where the powers that be didn't have the perpetrators under surveillance already?

I'm amused by the Catch 22 here. If they say they weren't tracking them, we wonder why they aren't doing their jobs better. If they say they were tracking them, we wonder why they failed to take action and so weren't doing their jobs.

Not just me then. I kind of thought it had something to do with HTML5 video and facebook or G+ notification checks. So background javascript then. Win7, 32 bit. I was getting the "Aw-snap" about once a day, and then more recently I'd walk away to make a coffee and come back to find Chrome had crashed completely.

This stuff comes and goes. Frequent hidden upgrades are both a blessing and a curse. You do get quick fixes, but you also get quick borkens. Methinks their regression testing could be a little more rigorous.

Alternative

I'm one of those strange dinosaurs who collects music and wants to take it all with me in a device with good battery life. So what I really wanted was a 1Tb iPod Classic. And by the usual standards of the electronics industry I should have had one by now. So when Tim Cook says "there were reasonable alternatives", I'd love to know what they are. And although a Sansa plus SD card makes a lot of sense, SSD is still too expensive in >128Gb sizes. I hit the limits on my 6th gen 160Gb about 5 years ago, so definitely want 250Gb and preferably 512Gb.

There are expensive and increasingly difficult options of taking a 2nd hand 5.5 or 7th gen Classic and fitting a 240Gb disk. But the firmware can't really cope as there are some hard limits you'd run up against.

Getting on for 10 years ago now I had a Creative Xen based on a 2.5" disk. I really wouldn't mind the extra size and weight of a 2.5" disk based device and that would mean it was that much more likely to survive into the future.

Re: Surplus

all network filesystems were missing.

This is something that puzzles me greatly. I find it very strange that Chromebooks (Chrome-OS) can't support the typical home NAS. There does seem to be a project to integrate network file systems but it's happening very, very slowly. Which again is strange when this is mature stable tech in every linux distro.

I also understand the logic of the control freakery around the boot process and stuff like Dev Mode, but I still think these things should be general purpose computers that can be booted into an alternate OS without jumping through hoops. So I'm glad that the hardware in chromebooks seems to be resurrecting the idea of the inexpensive netbook.

iPod

Re: Bah!

This doesn't seem so unreasonable to me, If you imagine Glastonbury running for 200 years, and then being discovered 3000 years later, we'd be finding the same stuff. The John Peel tent would have burnt down several times, been rebuilt as a permanent structure and then lost so only the post holes were left. And there'd be lost implements involved in the making of falafel buried nearby.

The earliest known graffiti on the stones dates from 700 years after it was built. I'd wager they'd already forgotten why it was built but recognised the solstice significance. And got back into the habit of having a yearly 3 day bender every mid summer.

The most important thing is the quality of the coffee. But if you really can't get anything decent, Tescos Italian, Lavazza Black and Carte Noire are remarkable for being wholly unremarkable while still perfectly acceptable. But then there's the Algerian Coffee shop and they sell online and deliver.

After that I think it's all about convenience. A cheap electric drip filter coffee machine for quantity and an Aeropress for single cups. Everything else just seems like obsession.

Re: Google-friendly?

I also don't see a lot of discussion about being able to demand (via the courts) that the site that actually hosted the data implements noindex, nofollow or a robots.txt suggestion to search engines for those pages.

It's so tempting to post another goo.gl short link here to the original source. But I won't.

I've been on the other end of this as sysadmin for a social network and had to deal with requests for allegedly libelous content too be removed that was posted by 3rd parties on our site and then indexed by Google. I don't believe this is Google's problem but rather that of the source and hosting site.

If somebody wants something removed they should inform the site hosting the information. The host should remove it, return a 404 with no index and no follow for that URI and then request a re-index of that page from google and other indexing sites that they allow via robots.txt. That includes archive.org.

The Internet Archive raises the issue of cached copies. This should also be dealt with via the 404-noindex-nofollow. Good caches should always respect the 404 and delete their cached copy.

This approach recognises that a piece of data on a URI may be copied repeatedly all over the web not just by search engines or by some future technology that makes that data visible. There needs to be a protocol for saying "It's gone as if it never existed". And sure enough, there is. It's 404.

There is a problem though that perhaps this EU ruling deals with. It's not normally possible for a 3rd party to tell Google to re-index a URI where they're not the webadmin as recognised for Google's webadmin tools. The source may have disappeared and 404 but google still has a record. It should be possible for the courts or a private individual via the courts to force Google to re-index that URI.﻿

Interpreter

So what date was the first BASIC interpreter fired up? And how does that compare with the first interpreted language? I only ask because Sinclair Basic was unbelievably easier than compiled COBOL on punch cards, or FORTRAN on paper tape. Reducing the edit-run-fail cycle to seconds from days changed everything.

Re: You can have my ipod when you get it from my cold dead fingers

Quite. So where's my 1TB iPod Classic, Apple? I know it's a small market but it's a real one. So if Apple won't make a pocket player that stores 1TB, plays FLAC, Ogg and so on and has a high quality DAC and output stage, then who will?

Re: upgrading old boxes

Quite so. A free (or very, very cheap) copy of Win7 premium for the ancient laptop next door please. And a cut down version of same for the ancient eeePC 900 upstairs.

Anyway. If all I want to run is Winamp, Chrome, Thunderbird, why do I need to upgrade from XP? It just works. There are no kids in the house any more so no-one who's going to click on some dodgy porn or film download site. So what's the problem?

Charging from this device is not supported

Will this deal with the problem where a perfectly good USB cable or USB port/charger doesn't work because "Charging from this device is not supported"? Even on Nokia phones with a nominal 5v charger this seems to be a problem because their phones expect a charger putting out 6.1v. Then there's the progressive corruption of the USB standard to support a whole range of high current support depending on either various voltages on the data pins or a data handshake. Can we please make this stuff "just work".

Because Chromebooks are capturing that market since Microsoft failed to kill it by charging too much for a crippled version of XP and 7?

And just when netbooks are getting enough screen res and processor power to make a tablet with an attached keyboard and a real OS a useful thing again. All they really have to do (apart from cut the price of the OS) is to point out the failings in the Chrome-OS left there by the control freak Chrome-OS developers. Like, say, lack of Samba support. Or the inability to run things like iTunes (I know, I know!).

There's a thing in here that always does my head in. "quasars that are so far apart, they cannot possibly have any “causal contact” in the last 14 billion years" So there can be a pair of quasars that are both in our light cone but are not in each other's light cone within the current life of the universe. Uh-huh?

Sadly my iOldDevice won't run iOs6 or iOs7. And all Google's recent app upgrades require >= 6 So while my top of the range iOldDevice was very expensive and state of the art at the time, it's now a handy paperweight and Winamp remote. Except that the very hard to replace battery is now dead so it's not even portable any more. And it complains about non-Apple USB chargers as well. So I guess it's a good thing the (deceased) company paid for it and it didn't cost me anything.

Upgrade? Pah!

Just checking my iPod Classic is still in my coat. I'd hate to lose that. Now Apple, about the 1TB Classic I was hoping for. Next year, m'kay?

There's a 3rd option. AOL sell it on. How much would they need to simply take over the source and support web sites?

There's a lot of proprietary libraries and agreements in winamp at the moment. Open Source may not be possible or it may be at least awkward.

While we're looking at music applications that were bought by a huge company that doesn't know what to do with it, last.fm Can we get CBS to sell it to somebody who understands? Like the original authors.

Some random comments

- Apparently we're not supposed to build a music collection any more. nothing else seems to work for those of us with really big collections. As much as anything it's the 5 pane window of the tree, artist, album, track, playlist that differentiates Winamp from pretty much every other player.

- And on that same subject, where's my 1Tb iPod Classic. Eh, Apple?

- Now where's Google in all this? If Winamp Android is better than Google play, perhaps Google could buy it. They need a desktop music player.

- It's not like it's costing AOL much. So why close it down? Is this some US MBAs idea of cost saving to get themselves a pay rise?

- MS buying Winamp is likely to be a disaster if Skype is anything to go by. It'll be fine for a year until some middle manager will want to rationalise the product set and combine WMP with Winamp creating a monster of the worst parts of both.

- Ideally, Winamp should be sold back to the original authors, or perhaps a consortium of the remaining programmers, for pennies.

- Same goes for last.fm. CBS don't know what to do with it, and so it's costing them money. So sell it to somebody who cares and can make a proper go of it.

- Why does an iTunes update take ages, require a huge download and often require a reboot. While a winamp update is 16mb and can be completed in under a minute?

Foot-In-Mouth Friday

I wonder what Greenwald's and the Grauniad's release schedule is? Is "Foot-in-mouth Friday" going to be a regular thing with yet another expose in the morning UK time, followed by an embarrassing press conference late afternoon, Washington time.

Because I think I'm going to have to subscribe to a popcorn delivery service to keep up.﻿

Cyberpunk?

I think you meant "Steampunk". And yes, I don't like the brass and big wooden handles. But then I'm not sure plugging the TARDIS into the the back of Dr Who's neck would be such a good thing either. If it's going to be perpetually 2014 in the next incarnation's TARDIS, then surely the UI should be an app on an android cleverphone?

Re: Secret laws

It's a deeply strange place and highly recommended. I half expected to see Gordon Freeman or a face crab round each corner. Especially with the sound effects playing constantly in the background. "skrrrsh skrrsh MEDIC!"

2 issues and one annoyance.

1) Is Google obeying the letter of the law? If not then what are HMRC doing about it?

2) If Google is obeying the letter of the law, what's the Government doing about it?

These questions matter much more than some grandstanding about corporate and government ethics, not to mention "EVIL"; however entertaining that might be.

And what's Google's profit on that £4.3bn of UK sales revenue? Because in the UK we don't tax corporate revenue, we tax corporate profit after a whole range of allowable costs. Saying "£2.4m in tax on £4.3bn of sales is just a joke" is meaningless. Especially if, say, costs were £4.299bn.